


Five Times Simon Believed

by imochan



Series: Three Times Prompt Challenge (Tumblr) [3]
Category: In the Flesh (TV)
Genre: Basically, M/M, Simon Monroe is a Hot Mess, is the theme of every ITF piece of write
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-13
Updated: 2015-02-13
Packaged: 2018-03-12 05:33:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3345407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imochan/pseuds/imochan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For anonymous, who asked for "Five Times Simon Monroe Believed," for the "Three Times" prompt challenge on Tumblr. </p>
<p>*(The nonny wrote five times, and once I started writing, I agreed this one needed more than three.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Times Simon Believed

**1.**

He believed in words, first. Tracing the burl of black type on faded pages with the whorls of his thumb, the gentle ridges and valleys of sentences, paragraphs like eddies of rough seawater, pages of punctuated breath. He found truth in the spines of books in his father’s room, lined like soldiers on the wall and stacked perilously on tables, spread on the floor, teetering on the arms of chairs, or left open, binding stitches exposed like little wounds, waiting restlessly next to a cooling cup of tea.

When he read, he matched the rhythm of his own narration to the way his da’s voice sounded, full of reverence and swathed in firelight.

 

**2.**

He believed in nothing, later on. For a while, he knew he  _wanted_  something,  _desperately_ , but couldn’t seem to find the thing that would cauterize the open nerve, and so it mutated, like an atrophying muscle, like a rotting bit of meat, like the grinding of vertebrae into dust.

It was so  _painful_ , to be so free of everything, and so he went about freeing himself from pain.  

 

**3.**

He did not believe in Heaven, because he knew the truth — when his body went into the ground, his soul stayed with it: food for worms and time. And so, after death, he believed in prophecy, instead.

It was the fiercest yet, like someone had reached into his spoiled viscera and plucked a rib from his side, sharpened it into the point of a knife and re-inserted it into the slots of his spine so that it pricked at the stubborn and immobile muscle of his heart, like the shadow of a pulse.

 

**4.**

He believed in Kieren Walker. The past had taught him that the future was unpredictable, but the Prophet had taught him that belief was like  _power_ , it could make things true and stand them in their place like buried stone, shrouding them from chaos, from missed chances, from the glancing blows of coincidence, and so he knew it was  _fate_ : to find this strange, wide-eyed, talented, suspicious boy with pale ginger hair, wrists latticed with scars, and a heart latticed with something like the same memories of raw emptiness, and have him be the one who would bring the last piece of meaning into their lives.

And this, it was so different – not a sharp prodding in his chest or a twisting of his spine, but something like the feel of a warm breeze on the back of his neck (like infant nerves ecstatic and gasping at every new touch).

 

**5.**

In the end, it turned out the future  _was_  chaos, there  _was_  no protection, and they were all being lifted slowly out of the stasis of death, and being told to remember how to live and let themselves lose loved ones, but no one prepared him for the way it would feel to have to go it alone inside, with no scaffolding of structured lines or comfort of self-destruction.

Just alone, out in the world, de-cloaked and divested of the last shreds of devotion, betrayed and the betrayer, in love with a boy in the fields and cemeteries of northern England,  _refusing_  to believe in anything other than the fact that if he extended his hand, Kieren would take it in his own.

 


End file.
